What is ServiceNow Customer Service Management? Everything You Need to Know

Bad service = lost customers.

Great service = loyal customers for life.

Simple math, right? This is what makes great customer service a crucial aspect for your business.

You might be surprised to learn that a recent survey by Bain and Company revealed that 8 out of 10 businesses believe they are providing excellent customer service. However, when customers were asked the same question, only 8% agreed. There is a huge disconnect, right? This disconnect is attributed to many reasons—lack of customer understanding, inadequate self-service options, lack of alignment, and more.

These challenges make it hard for leaders to maintain their customer experience, let alone take it to the next level. But it doesn’t have to be that way, which is why we’re introducing you to ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM), a solution that can take your customer service to the next level while controlling the operating cost.

In this blog, we’ll discuss what ServiceNow CSM is and how it can help your organization.

Let’s get started!

What is ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM)?

ServiceNow CSM is a cloud-based solution built on the ServiceNow AI Platform that groups key capabilities and applications to enhance every aspect of the customer lifecycle. It brings people, systems, and data into a single system of action to deliver the service and support your customers’ needs.

Let me put this in another way. CSM allows businesses of all sizes and industries to create a unified system to deliver exceptional and seamless customer service that goes beyond expectations.

It unifies customer service and business processes while uniting relevant teams to promptly identify the issues and resolve them within a specific time frame.

Benefits of ServiceNow CSM

ServiceNow Customer Service Management offers the following benefits to deliver next-level customer services:

Breaking Down Silos

As reported by Learn G2, 71% of customer service staff indicate that switching between various communication channels has created difficulties for them in fulfilling customer requirements. They often rely on email, phone calls, chat, and other applications to get the information required to solve customer queries.

CSM breaks down the silos by consolidating all the customer data and interactions into a single platform. This provides a single source of action for all the customer information, so agents can understand the customer issues and solve them more promptly.

Furthermore, Customer Service Management can also be integrated with other ServiceNow products such as IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), and Field Service Management (FSM), breaking down the cross-departmental communication silos.

Delivers Exceptional Services While Reducing the Cost

Nowadays, organizations of all sizes are under pressure to reduce costs while meeting rising customer expectations. Customer Service Management efficiently uses the resources available to boost the first-time fix rate.

It can automate several key operations involved in customer service processes such as case management, work assignment, task automation, self-service portals, and more. By leveraging AI and machine learning, CSM can automate mundane tasks, allowing agents to focus on more strategic tasks.

You can set detailed performance metrics and gain real-time insights into these metrics to eliminate the bottlenecks in the process and inspire them to improve the process.

Proactively Monitor Products and Services to Identify and Solve Issues

True prevention is not waiting for bad things to happen; it’s preventing things from happening in the first place.

ServiceNow CSM looks for telltale patterns or potential bottlenecks or outrages. This helps the IT and service team identify the issues in their early stages. Once issues are identified, CSM can initiate the digital workflows to ensure the right people take the right steps to solve the issue.

Furthermore, you can also build a customer-aware install base to know the customers who have or are using the product or service. Once the issue is identified, all the potentially impacted customers are notified about the issue and the estimated time of resolution.

ServiceNow Customer Service Management Features

ServiceNow Customer Service Management has the following features to improve the customer experience:

Now Assist for CSM

A generative AI-powered capability within your CSM workspace. It summarizes the entire customer chat, cases, and incidents, be it via live agent or virtual agent conversations, to help your team grasp the context easily. Plus, they can also view the actions taken and resolution details, along with resolution notes.

Now Assist drafts knowledge articles based on multiple case records to preserve institutional knowledge and suggests responses for chat and email, improving agent efficiency and consistency.

Overall, this feature gives your teams instant clarity on conversation history, better understanding, and saved effort, improving overall productivity.

Service Portal

Service portal in CSM is a modern, mobile-friendly gateway that allows both your employees and customers to access self-service applications, information, and workflows anywhere and anytime.

Users can find solutions and request help easily without contacting support, all thanks to step-by-step and instructional guides and a single portal for all services. Therefore, making the workflows fast and structured.

The service portal includes an intelligent search that can suggest relevant articles and content available.

Service Catalog

Service catalog in ServiceNow CSM is a collection of services you offer. You can list all your services on the portal, and the customers can go through it and opt for those they wish to seek. They can order services and track the status of their requests, simplifying the process.

These catalog-driven processes can bypass human agent interactions, routing requests directly to the right department or fulfillment team. Built-in workflows ensure that each request is monitored, routed, and tracked, enabling visibility into request progress and delays.

Engagement Messenger

Engagement Messenger allows you to embed self-service directly into external websites and mobile apps. Therefore, helping customers to seek support whenever and wherever they need it.

This feature allows searching across the knowledge base, service catalog items, and more, with context based on their current page. Also, it presents guided request forms to initiate services and support talks.

AI Agents for CSM

ServiceNow AI Agents offer versatile functionalities for customer service management.

• AI Agents in CSM sort incoming cases by gathering context, verifying customer info, checking submitted documents, and escalating them when needed.
• AI monitors customer sentiments in real time and signals if a customer is unhappy or if there is a high-priority issue, therefore enabling teams to take quick action to help customers.
• CSM agents collaborate within a broader AI Agent fabric, which connects with IT, HR, and finance agents to process requests across departments.

CSM Configurable Workspace

These workspaces are customized, purpose-built UIs designed to bring together all the tools, data, insights, and AI assistance that a team needs to do their work efficiently from a single screen.

You get multiple workspaces together that boost productivity, create engaging experiences, quickly build and configure, and scale easily.

The workspaces you get are as follows:

• Service Operations Workspace: A central hub to monitor and resolve IT incidents and outages.
• Cloud Operations Workspace: Manage discovery jobs, resources, and cloud spend trends.
• Hardware Asset Workspace: Oversee hardware lifecycle tasks such as inventory, RMAs, and audits.
• CSM Configurable Workspace: Handle customer cases end-to-end with context and guidance.
• Dispatcher Workspace: Schedule and manage field technicians and work crews.
• Security Analyst Workspace: Respond to security incidents and analyze threat data.
• HR Agent Workspace: Manage employee cases, chats, and calls from one interface.
• Project Workspace: Centralize project planning, tracking, and collaboration.
• Procurement Specialist Workspace: Handle sourcing, negotiation, and purchase activities.

Case Management

Case management refers to the process by which support agents track cases through various channels. These cases are then assigned to the relevant support staff for resolution. You can also track the activities involved in the resolution process, such as phone calls made, emails sent, knowledge base research, conversations with the experts, and many more.

• With case management, you can tailor forms to capture only relevant information using picklists and selectors.
• It performs service modeling, which helps define who can access cases and view details for effective self-service.
• Helps configure SLAs to track internal or customer-facing timelines.
• Automates alerts and tracking to avoid SLA breaches.

Continual Improvement Management (CIM)

CIM helps you find areas where your customer service can be improved. Users can raise CIM opportunities directly when they identify an area of improvement. For each identified opportunity, CIM creates a multiphase project with defined tasks guiding improvement efforts. It includes visual tools like a value realization dashboard to track progress, monitor KPIs, and compare outcomes against expected goals.

CIM can be linked with process mining and performance analytics that allow for data-driven insights. It provides a defined PDCA (plan-do-check-act) cycle that helps teams to deploy, measure, and sustain improvements over time. This ensures accountability and prevents reversion to old ways.

Beyond this, it also provides a plan to make these improvements happen and keeps track of the number of improvements made so far.

Process Mining

Previously called Process Optimization, ServiceNow Process Mining is a tool that helps you visualize and optimize the work that flows in your business.

It automatically builds process maps using system logs without manual mapping. This helps you identify bottlenecks, redundant steps, or compliance deviations without guesswork.

You can visualize process variants and compare different execution paths to identify underlying issues of why steps are delayed or skipped. It groups similar instances and looks into how related processes work interconnectedly with each other.

Process mining tightly integrates with analytics, continual improvement, performance tracking, and automation to continuously refine processes.

Predictive Intelligence

Predictive Intelligence is a tool that leverages machine learning capabilities to analyze historical data. It can predict, categorize, recommend, and cluster information, automating routing tasks across IT, HR, customer service, and more.

It simplifies categorizing incidents, assignment groups, and case types; predicts outcomes and resolution times; and finds similar records. Moreover, it offers AI-based tasks and content suggestions to agents and provides deeper insights into delays that occur and improvements made.

This tool makes all this possible by using a predictive intelligence workbench to create models without coding. These models are deployed via built-in business rules and a flow designer that offers real-time predictions.

Mobile Experience for Customer Service Management

The Customer Service Mobile Application allows you to manage customer service cases from your mobile device. It will enable you to stay connected and access the information in real-time to complete tasks quickly.

Service agents can quickly review cases and work on resolving them in no time. They can perform routine actions and approvals effectively, anytime and anywhere. Not only them, but customers can also use this application to track their case status.

Workspaces In Customer Service Management

The Workspace in ServiceNow offers a centralized view that allows customer service agents to handle all types of tasks, understand an issue, and get suggestions to resolve that issue.

Different types of agents can use the Workspace:

• Chat/SMS Agents: These agents handle customer requests that come in through chat or SMS.
• Phone Agents: These agents deal with customer inquiries that come in over the phone.
• Case Agents: These agents handle cases that are created from the Consumer Portals or inbound emails.
• Location Agents: These agents handle cases that are created from walk-up interactions.

ServiceNow Customer Service Management Pricing

ServiceNow offers you various packages that offer varied features and capabilities for customer service management in your business.

Here is an overview of what you will get in different plans:

A ServiceNow consulting partner like Cyntexa can evaluate your business requirements and help you identify a plan that is specific to your business.

How To Get Started With ServiceNow CSM?

ServiceNow Customer Service Management is an adaptable solution that can improve your customer service operations across your front, middle, and back office. To begin with, you must be clear about your customer service goals and prioritize them. You must have an understanding of the various applications and features it offers and which ones you need to achieve your customers’ loyalty.

ServiceNow offers various internal resources like articles, blogs, demos, and videos that can give you insights into the technology. Also, it offers a developer instance that you can use to gain hands-on experience with the platform.

Still, if you need more assistance, ServiceNow consulting companies are your go-to solution.
Cyntexa, a ServiceNow consulting service provider with a team of 400+ tech professionals, carefully listens to your business requirements and aims to provide you with the best of their services.

Schedule a consultation call today!

AUTHOR

Shubham

Service Cloud, Salesforce Managed Packages

With over 5 years of experience, Shubham specialize in curating solutions on Salesforce Service Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Consumer Goods Cloud, Managed Packages, and ServiceNow ITSM. He designs and implements end-to-end service solutions that improve operational workflows and ensure seamless integration across enterprise systems. Shubham’s expertise lies in creating secure, efficient, and agile platforms tailored to unique business needs.